then there is no labor, then there is . . . .
Bamboo root mats are the nastiest things on earth to grub up, just about. I dug out a dozen or so chunks of it, beating back the grove along the back side of our lot, and shoveling up the composted leaves and humus and sharp sand that had been overtop it. It looks as though the sharp sand got laid down as the base for a driveway at one point, and then bamboo and pecan leaves fell and rotted for years, mixing with the native dirt. It makes for pretty good soil, once it rots just a bit more. L is promising to rake the thatch out of the yard tomorrow evening, and I can pitch that into the pen as well. At some point, I’m going to have to figure out a gate kind of arrangement so I can shovel out the composted material, though, once it’s done.
For the last two or three days, we’ve been having heavy thunderstorms of an evening, making for four or five inches of rain since the first of the month. It keeps filling up (and sometimes overflowing) the rain barrel, but because of the leak in the overflow tubes, it all keeps running away—which isn’t much use if you’re trying to conserve water.
I also ended up at Matt’s house, doing a job of minor plumbing for him; he wanted to replace his kitchen sink’s faucet with a single-handle, Moen-type faucet. Apparently he expected that he’d end up under the sink with me handing him things, but it came out the other way round, and I was the one underneath, unhooking and rehooking connections. The most difficult part was removing the socket for the old sprayer, which had corroded. It kept dropping flecks of lime and assorted salts into my eyes as I worked, and I couldn’t get a good enough hold on it to turn the vinyl nut. In the end I had to cut away the nut to remove the bracket. After that, the installation was extremely easy, and when I hooked it all back up and turned on the water again, it worked just as it should.
The dinosaur infiltrates the sin-ridden business card. Fnord.
